Use of OER is not restricted to online teaching and learning. It is common to conflate OER with online learning and electronic resources, but, while most OER exists in a digital format, it is the content that is openly licensed and therefore transmutable into almost any format in any learning environment.
The learning environment could be a traditional face-to-face classroom or lecture hall in which you use a printed and bound version of your adopted, and customized, open textbook. Or, the learning environment can be completely digital – via the open web or Learning Management System (LMS).
The majority of SUNY campuses provide and support an LMS. As of this writing, Blackboard Learn is used predominantly in SUNY, but Moodle, Canvas, and a few other platforms are also used.
An Integration Scenario
Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
Your campus uses Blackboard Learn as its LMS. Your course is a hybrid course, where you use the LMS to house content and engage learners with activities and assignments. You use the face-to-face classroom to present new content and work through problem sets. You have chosen to replace your College Success textbook with an open textbook, and the librarian at your campus has helped you find an OER College Success textbook that is published in Pressbooks.
After reviewing the “original” OER textbook, you decide that it requires some additional content – content that you have found in another OER College Success resource. You integrate this additional content into the Pressbooks site, and create a customized textbook for your course.
From Pressbooks, you can bring your new textbook into Blackboard with chapters offered as course modules, offer it as a PDF, printed text, and/or e-book. You can also offer it on the open web with no sign-in required.
When you’ve finished remixing, you’re ready to incorporate your new material into Blackboard. This can mean several things:
- Copying and pasting material from the open text into Blackboard items or modules
- Making links to individual pages of the open text as Blackboard items
- Putting a link to the entire web text in your syllabus and/or as a Blackboard item
- Putting a copy of the text PDF in Blackboard for students to download
- Integrating the open text as a seamless Blackboard component
All of these options are acceptable ways to use OER – some of them require a lot more manual labor than others, however. That last option is by far the most user-friendly for you and your students, and requires the least amount of work from you.
Across SUNY, we work with Lumen Learning as a vendor partner to provide the LMS integration.
When you’re ready for Blackboard integration, submit a request to oer@suny.edu with the link to your remixed book, and you’ll receive a zip file and 2-step instructions to load it into your course. Depending on your campus, your LMS administrator may need to help you with this step.
If you’re interested in providing your students with a print option of the open text you’re using, you can email us at oer@suny.edu to request a print version.
Finally, we recommend that you consider multiple strategies for getting materials in your students’ hands. Student surveys indicate they appreciate having different ways to access course materials, depending on when and how they are studying.
Unless otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.